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Wednesday, 8 May 2013

I'm running an informal Stupid Questions thread over in the forum, for all those questions that start off "this is probably a stupid question, but...". The following answer is really long and something that confuses a lot of people, so I figured it was worth its own blog post.

Explain how the $$ column works. When does money get listed there, and when is it removed?

The $ column on the dashboard shows a pending estimate of confirmed money
earnt by each lens. Lensrank money doesn't go there because a) it's not
'confirmed' and b) it makes sense to have sales and ad earnings
reported separately anyway.

This money shows up as
soon as the third party site passes the information to Squidoo; so as
soon as items ship for Amazon, once a month for eBay and Cafepress/CJ.
It will then sit there until that money gets paid out, which can be up
to two paydays/months later for Amazon (cause that shows up straight
away), but is usually the next week for eBay (cause it doesn't show for
so long) and I think Cafepress is the same as eBay.

We
do get accurate sale and earning reports in the stats of each
individual lens, but we didn't used to. The stats have improved, the
dashboard hasn't changed in years. When I started, Squidoo still wasn't
reliably in the top 8.5% Amazon tier; or people weren't sure it would
be. These days it always is. The estimate on the dash dates back to (I
assume) before Squidoo could guarantee a higher commission, whereas it
knew it would get the lower one (e.g. 6%).

The actual amount is 67% of what is really sitting
in the 'earnt' tab. Or really close to that. Which may be random
chance, but it comes pretty close to the difference between 3% and 4.25%
(i.e. our share of Amazon commissions under the 'easy' to get 6% and
the current 8.5%). The other sites don't really count, because it was
built around Amazon and Amazon is the one that reports reliably enough
for it to matter. It doesn't entirely make sense, unless the estimate
proportion changed historically (or they brought it in when Squidoo
could guarantee 4% so people could be happily surprised by 6% (or
rather, 2% and 3%) - which does exactly match). It's definitely built into the algorithm somewhere, because it does it for all money that is attributed to a lens.

And any monies paid out on payday will disappear from the dash. So the only reliable estimate
is noticing how much it drops by the next day, and deducing that the
remainder is mostly the last months earnings that are still pending.

So, $$ column:

pending royalties that a) Squidoo knows about and b) have been confirmed/shipped/paid out by site to Squidoo

does
not include ad money cause that's calculated independently of your lens
and won't happen for another month after this one anyway

Amazon sales will sit there about two months, other monies will sit there about a week, depending on when payday is

the
actual time of sale/time of commission clearing may not match up
perfectly to the payday times. Usually Squidoo's paydays are a little
bit further apart than the 'clearance' times so you'll get the
commission whether it was at the beginning of the month or the end, but
it's a little messy. Also the payday month is not the same as the
calendar month, cause it's 15th to 15thish rather than 1st to 1st.

So, dash = rolling snapshot of current confirmed earnings that have not yet been paid out.

Will include upcoming payday earnings which will disappear from the total (and the lenses) once paid.

Will also include recently earnt monies that won't be paid until next payday.
Checking your total right after payday will give you a good prediction
of the following payday (and you know that if it goes up before that
payday arrives, that money will be for the FOLLOWING payday yet again).

Prediction
won't include the monthly reporting sites like eBay, but you could
write the number down and then add however much it jumps by when the
eBay update arrives and that's probably not worth tracking closely
(cause you'll be about to get paid then anyway), but you can certainly
estimate it in your head.

Used to be the main way of tracking
sales before updated stats tabs/points. The earnings column used to not
show shipped earnings.

Was built to track Amazon sales, doesn't
work so well with the other sites, at least for our purposes. All monies
get treated the same when they show on the dash.

Estimate is based on either a random amount or the Amazon tiers and probably dates back to when Squidoo only got 6% (or only wanted to promise that, even though it was getting 7 or 7.5%)

So if you look at your pending total, you can know:

1. It's just Amazon (unless it's right after eBay updated and you had a bunch of new $$$ appear)

2.
Half (or whatever) was earnt last month and will be paid out to you in
the coming payday. Whatever is currently rolling in will be paid out the
payday after.